Just trying to make my way in language, love, and law

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Refictionalisation

After what seems like years I’m finally writing again. Not with the usual spurt of ennui-repressed desperation, but eagerly, proactively. Speaking cynically, it’s because I quit my job earlier this year, although frankly I don’t think my workload of full-time study and part-time subsistence work has gotten any easier to bear.

Fiction — ‘proper’, high-culture fiction of the canonical variety — has never been my thing. “Write what you know,” is the ever-popular advice, but that’s always bored me. Why should I? If what I know doesn’t interest me very much, why should it interest a reader?

Instead I choose to write what I don’t. I suppose I write poetry reflectively, to plumb my thoughts, but I write genre fiction adventurously. It’s a way of getting myself out of my headspace.

I suppose what this new output really means is that I’m thinking beyond myself and my immediate reality more often.